New York has a pretty bad reputation for having rats in the subway without having one crawl up on a guy's shoulder and try to get cozy with him. New York city cops have recently stressed that "Subways are not for sleeping". They claim it's to reduce the chance of theft but it looks like there's another safety issue that passengers should be aware of.

Rats' superpowers are near-mythical: They can swim for three days. They can fit through holes the size of a quarter. They've even been said to have no solid bones, just cartilage (definitely false, and I can't confirm whether they can collapse their ribcages). I looked to science for the truth. But I was surprised by the dearth of studies on the Norway rat—the common city rat, Rattus norvegicus—in the wild (the wild in this case being any city on Earth). Despite our long human history with lab rats, we know very little about the lives of the rats in our homes.

..."If it doesn't have food and water, it goes into this kind of 'crazy mode,'" ['Rat King' Robert] Corrigan said. Rats have a very low tolerance for hunger—so to get rid of them simply ask where they're getting food and eliminate the source.

Corrigan said... it does make it easier for rats to get into toilets. As if to make the point, the day after we capped our toilet pipe, a rat popped up in my next-door neighbor's toilet.

Plus, toilet drainage turns out to be a boon for sewer rats. "Lots of food gets flushed," Corrigan pointed out.

Yep, you can't think of the toilet as a safe throne. Think of it more of a rat dimensional portal.

They even put together a frighteningly descriptive video on just exactly a rat can make its little way up to the commode and into your nightmares.

Here's a TL;DW gif:

We apologize for stripping you of further illusions of comfort. Blame the rats.